Defensive Programming - Friend or Foe?
One of the worst things about embedded development (especially in C) is receiving a return value of -1 or unknown_error from a function, with no other information about why the failure took place. It provides no information about where the error bubbled up from! We’ve all been here as embedded developers, bringing up new boards, drivers, modules, and applications, wondering why and how we got into this mess. Root causing these issues is like peeling an onion: each layer we dig through while debugging, we smile a bit less and a few more tears are shed. These sorts of
Source: memfault.com